APGoogle provided a report Sunday revealing the large number of requests from government agencies and courts to remove content from its services.

Google's latest Transparency Report shows an increased effort by governments to censor internet search results and YouTube videos in the second half of 2011, and the United States is leading the way.

U.S. government agencies sent Google 187 requests for the removal of a total of 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts and video archives. That's 718 percent more items than the U.S. wanted Google to take down during the first half of 2011. Brazil had the most government requests with 194, but those requests only called for the removal of 554 items.

Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou called the statistics released yesterday "troubling" because many of the removal requests target political speech posted by Google users.

"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Chou wrote on Google's public policy blog.

Chou noted specific requests that were indications of government censorship. For instance, Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures like mayors and public prosecutors. Google did not comply with the request.

In Canada, officials asked Google to delete a video of a citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. Google refused to delete the video.

Some of the U.S. requests revealed in the report were from local law enforcement agencies. One asked for the removal of a blog that allegedly defamed a law enforcement official, while another asked for the removal of 1,400 videos because of alleged harassment. Google did not comply with either request. The tech company also received a court order to remove 218 search results that linked to allegedly defamatory websites. It removed 25 percent of those items.

Google complied with at least part of 42 percent of U.S. requests -- less than half of the requests it complied with during the second half of 2010.

The report shows a conflict for Google, which faces the task of obeying the law in countries that ban certain speech but also remaining committed to free expression elsewhere.

According to Huffington Post, Google says it cannot lawfully remove any content for which they are merely the host and not the producers.

Forbes.com tech columnist Andy Greenberg applauded Google for "taking a strong stand against censorship," but also expressed concern over Google's relationship with the U.S. government.

"Google has been criticized for failing to reveal much about its reported partnership with the National Security Agency following a Chinese attack on its systems in 2010," Greenberg wrote. "And the company has yet to take a stand on the House's recently-passed Cyber Infrastructure Security and Protection Act or its equivalents in the Senate, which are designed to give companies far more leeway to hand data over to government agencies for security purposes."

Other governments that frequently request content removal from Google include Germany and India.